We must have been some hours asleep when I awoke, or thought I did,
pretty much the same thing so far as my feelings at the moment went,
lying on my back, with my hands crossed on my breast, like the statue
of a knight templar. These said paws of mine seemed by the way to be
of an inconceivable weight, as if they had actually been petrified, and
to press so heavily on my chest as to impede my breathing. Suddenly
one of my little fingers grew, like Jonah's gourd, to a devil of a
size; and next moment the thumb of the other hand, as if determined not
to be outdone by the minikin on the left, became a facsimile of a
Bologna sausage; so there I lay like a large lobster, with two
tremendous claws. My nose then took its turn, and straightway was
converted into one of Mr M----'s cotton bags, that lay in the store
below, containing three hundred-weight, more or less.
"Oh!" said I now to myself, "what a fool I have been!
Nightmare--nightmare."
"Hookey, but it isn't though," said Listado.
"Hillo," said I to myself again--for I was quite certain I had not
spoken--"how the deuce can Listado answer my _thoughts_, which I have
never uttered?"--And I tried to ask him, but my nose, or the cotton
bag, would not let me speak. "Why, it must be nightmare," again
thought I to myself.
"The devil a nightmare is it," again said Listado.
And I now began to take fright in earnest; when, on the opposite wall,
for I could only see in the direction of the foot of my bed, a
gradually increasing gleam of pale glow-worm-coloured light fell;
streaming apparently through the door that opened at my shoulder into
the large lumber-room already described.
The light seemed to proceed from the further end of this apartment,
because the shadow of one of the boxes of goods that lay scattered
about the floor was cast strongly against the wall of my room at the
foot of the bed.
"What can this mean?" for I knew from actual survey the geography of
the apartment from whence the glare proceeded; "what can this mean?
Some trick of Listado's. Snapdragon, snapdragon."
"Snapdragon be d--d simply," quoth Listado's voice once more.
"Heyday," quoth I.
But there he lay, full in the stream of light, apparently sound asleep;
and so transmogrified under its baleful influence, that he looked more
like a corpse than a living man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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